The invention relates generally to telephone call centers and, more particularly, to call management techniques for use in telephone call centers.
A call center is a facility that handles telephone calls for an organization, usually using some level of computer control. Typically, the telephone calls handled by a call center are incoming calls from present or potential customers of the organization. The incoming calls are generally distributed among a number of agents within the call center who are each trained to handle certain types of incoming calls. A call center will normally be capable of handling many different types of calls coming into the organization. For example, a call center may be set up to receive calls relating to each of a multitude of different products, product types, or product families sold by the corresponding organization. Alternatively, or in addition, a call center may be arranged to handle calls relating to different services or information dissemination functions provided by the organization. Some such services/functions include: taking product orders, providing customer service, providing pricing and/or availability information, or any of a variety of other functions. The types of calls that are supported by a call center are commonly referred to as the xe2x80x9cskillsxe2x80x9d of the call center.
It is often desirable that each of the different skills associated with a call center be handled differently by the call center. That is, some of the skills may be deemed by the corresponding organization to be more important than other skills and hence are to be given more attention or better service by the call center. Thus, a service level target is often defined for each of the different skills of the call center to indicate a desired level of service for the skill. However, past techniques for achieving the desired service levels for each of the skills of a call center have generally been inadequate. That is, actual performance levels for the different skills have not accurately reflected the desired service level targets defined for those skills.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus that is capable of accurately achieving desired service level targets for skills in a call center.
The present invention relates to a system for use in a call center that is capable of achieving predetermined service level targets for a plurality of call center skills to a relatively high degree of accuracy. The system uses a plurality of reserve agents that are not affiliated with any particular skill or skill set in the call center. That is, the reserve agents can each be assigned to any of the various skills of the call center based on current system conditions. Once assigned to a particular skill, a reserve agent then works in conjunction with the agents assigned to that skill to process calls for that skill. In a preferred embodiment, the system calculates an xe2x80x9cexpected wait timexe2x80x9d for each new call received by the call center for a particular skill. The expected wait time represents an anticipated amount of time that the caller associated with the new call will have to wait before his call is addressed by call center personnel. When the expected wait time for a new call exceeds a threshold value associated with the skill, the system assigns a reserve agent to the skill to aid in the processing of calls for the skill, thus reducing the expected wait time for the skill.
In accordance with the present invention, the threshold value associated with a particular skill is dynamically adjusted during normal system operation based on a measured service level being provided to the skill. Preferably, the threshold value is varied in a manner that is designed to achieve the desired service level target for the skill. Thus, if the call center is achieving less than a desired service level for a particular skill, the corresponding threshold value is reduced and a reserve agent will be assigned to that skill more readily. Conversely, if the call center is achieving greater than the desired service level for the skill, the threshold value is increased and a reserve agent will be assigned to that skill less readily. In this manner, the system can achieve the desired service level targets for each of the skills of the call center to a relatively high degree of accuracy.